Illegal Border Crossings Today:

Santa Ana Voters Reject Ballot Measure Allowing Illegal Aliens to Vote; Proponents Vow to Continue Fight

illegal immigration vote voting slip button

FAIR Take | November 2024

On November 5, voters in the City of Santa Ana rejected a ballot measure that would have allowed noncitizen residents, including illegal aliens, to vote in local municipal elections. If the measure had passed, Santa Ana would have been the first California city to give noncitizens the ability to cast ballots in local elections.

The ballot measure, known as DD, asked voters to decide whether “the City of Santa Ana City Charter [should] be amended to allow, by the November 2028 general municipal election, noncitizen City residents to vote in all City of Santa Ana municipal elections.” This would have included noncitizens voting for mayor and city council, in addition to ballot measures and initiatives.

Santa Ana voters roundly opposed its passage with approximately 60 percent of voters casting their ballot against the measure. According to James Lacy, the activist who organized the opposition to Measure DD, voting is a precious right. He said, “We will continue to be vigilant in protecting this right at the ballot box and in the courts.” He continued, “We call on other cities and agencies that have been considering diluting voting rights in the past, such as San Jose, and even the San Diego Unified School District, to take notice of our success in Santa Ana and reject noncitizen voting.”

However, proponents say they will continue to advocate for noncitizen voting and believe support for Measure DD will continue to grow. Carlos Perea, the Executive Director of the Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice, expressed optimism that success may lie in the future, saying that “it took San Francisco three tries to get noncitizen voting passed, and now we have a stronger and larger coalition of residents who are more emboldened.”

Polling trends, though, do not corroborate the proponents’ views. The broader trend in voter sentiment, especially among Latinos, is that citizenship is an essential prerequisite for certain rights, such as voting. Jon Gould, who is Dean of the School of Social Ecology at UC Irvine, surmised that this shift is “in line with trends we’ve been seeing in both polling and elections of the Latino community getting more conservative on issues of immigration.”

Regardless of the future of Measure DD, one thing is clear – this election cycle Santa Ana voters want to protect the rights of citizenship.

 

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